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Pope Invites his Flock to Join Facebook: Is the Digital Reformation Here?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…g with regard to religious practice in particular. Both internet and smart phone users were more likely to participate in religious or spiritual groups than were people who do not regularly use digital media. By “participate,” the researchers were referring to physical, geographically located, face-to-face engagement: attending meetings, volunteering, taking leadership roles, and donating money. In all of these categories, participation was higher…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…uality those values call for. This is the harder challenge. Assuming our efforts engender a broader and deeper recognition of privilege, the simple truth is that as a small denomination we can’t make commitments on behalf of an entire culture so deeply invested in white privilege. Nonetheless, to quote Billy Joel, “I have been a fool for lesser things.” And there are some tangible things we can do. Such as: Intentionally committing to calling blac…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…answer to those questions is, in my opinion, a most definite yes. Over the phone, Deaton explained that Collins captures the helplessness of its hero–and, through that sense of helplessness, the dynamics of trauma. “Trauma really is about the moment of freezing,” said Deaton. “What is traumatic is when there’s nothing that can be done.” Collins, he said, sustains a kind of trapped tension throughout the books—that feeling that you’re “never really…

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

…from ministry, locked down at home, and “trying to be of service over the phone and zoom” to people in his church facing another pandemic. Pieters is part of a unique cohort for whom the current pandemic is both eerily familiar and puzzlingly different. LGBT Christian clergy who ministered in queer communities in the 1980s and 90s are engaging Covid-19 using some lessons learned from AIDS ministry in the years before treatment. They’re also grapp…

Discovering “Little Syria”—New York’s Long-Lost Arab Neighborhood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…Gibran. For Fine, the Save Washington Street project is part of the same effort. “We are persistent,” he told me by phone, “because these stories have a real impact on people.” Telling stories grounded in real Arab-American history is the only way to reach understanding. And understanding is still sorely needed. One imagines what the Islamophobic activists who conjured the “Ground Zero Mosque” debacle a couple years back would do with the news of…

A Portrait of Islamophobia?

By Mariam Durrani

…en fruit bowl, a few artificial flowers, half a bottle of Sprite, and some phone chargers. The two smaller images feature the cluttered interior of a walk-in closet with a bunch of clothes and a faint family portrait on the wireframe shelf, and something that will be familiar to anyone with a newborn child: a rocking seat next to a pink and yellow baby mat. With the caption “A Home Revealed,” the audience is left to make sense of these household p…

Finding the “Good Girl Role Model”

By Kathryn Joyce

…r family, publishing their personal details online so that activists could phone and text-message “Agata” to dissuade her from her choice. They followed Agata to a second clinic when the family attempted the procedure there; charging in the media that the girl was being pressured into the abortion by Planned Parenthood and informing the police that Agata’s mother was “inciting her daughter to abortion,” leading to the illegal separation of the gir…

“We Blew it” on Climate Change, But May Survive Anyway: An RD Discussion with the First Transhumanist Candidate

By Andrew Aghapour

…nt to attack the green problem. It is very unique and a bit radical, but unfortunately we blew it as a species and there’s no turning the ship of global warming around any more. It’s too late. You’ve written that we might go so far as to leave our physical forms completely and become “virtual avatars.” Could you explain that? It’s just a matter of time before we figure out how to get every single thought in our head—or at least a basic configurati…

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t: The Problem of the Rape Exception

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…hicago NORC General Social Survey. From the nineties to the ‘aughties that number rose from 16% to 21%—more than one in five Americans. Meanwhile the GOP has, since January, been busy trying to shrink the very definition of rape to only deem those who suffered “forcible rape” eligible to receive federal funding for an abortion. Forcible. Not statutory rape. These are the kinds of distinctions they find it crucial to draw. What, you thought they’…

Denying Communion to Prochoice Politicians

By Frances Kissling

…hington DC as HHS secretary. Sebelius a pro-choice Catholic has had the misfortune of living in one of the half dozen or so dioceses where Bishops have either told legislators to refrain from receiving communion, or issued not-in-my-backyard threats against candidates who do not live in their diocese, telling them they would not be welcome to receive communion should they ever show up in their fiefdom. Fiefdom is a reasonable synonym for Diocese i…